Garden Decor: Arts, gardens in full flower
The artistic and horticultural talents of East Enders were on full display Sunday, as hundreds of people flocked to Munjoy Hill to enjoy tours of the neighborhood’s gardens and artist studios.
“It’s going very well,” said Pauli Daniels, a member of the Garden Tour Committee, which organized the Munjoy Hill Hidden Gardens Tour with the Munjoy Hill Neighborhood Organization. “The morning started off with a bang. People were lined up to get tickets.”
Both the garden tour and the East End Open Studios Tour - organized by the Society for East End Arts - are in their second year.
Lesli Chambers and her husband, Matt, moved to North Street three summers ago. They went on the tour last year. Inspired by what neighbors had done, the couple labored even harder on their own backyard, which became part of the tour this year.
A yard that was once overcome with weeds and anchored by a rusty chain-link fence is now a picturesque scene complete with a stone wall and stairs that lead down to a small terrace accented by succulents.
“We come out in the yard, you don’t even feel like you’re in the city,” Lesli Chambers said. “You can have a little escape.”
Digging up asphalt, ripping down old fences and otherwise fighting to carve out some green space is just part of the process for city gardeners.
Over at Morning Street, Bob Krug and Aurelia Scott turned what was once a garage into a porch and dug up part of their driveway to make space for Scott’s garden.
Krug, who temporarily took over tour-guide duties for his wife, talked about the challenges Scott faced in city gardening. One trick, he said, is to use raised beds so “you can have good soil instantly.”
But beyond giving advice to fellow gardeners and selling art to passers-by, Sunday’s tours were also about celebrating Munjoy Hill’s resurgence as one of Portland’s most diverse and attractive neighborhoods.
Randee Bucknell, vice president of the neighborhood organization, has lived on the hill for 10 years. “My first night on the hill, someone broke one of my windows,” she said. Now Bucknell is proud to hear people say Munjoy Hill is looking the way it did 50 years ago.
Dennis Sheehy, who makes handcrafted gnome houses at his home on Munjoy Street, said the neighborhood’s artistic community is thriving similarly.
“We really have a sizable art community here,” he said, noting that the Society for East End Arts has more than 50 members, ranging from painters to sculptors to ceramists.
“Munjoy Hill has gone under a transformation in the past 10 years,” he said. “But it still has a blend of . . . people living here.”
